NEW YORK -- By the time Clifford Odets' The Big Knife premiered on Broadway in 1949, he had been writing Hollywood screenplays for more than a decade; and to say that he harbored no illusions about that place would be a vast understatement.

In the 1930s, dramas such as Awake and Sing! and Golden Boy -- the latter was revived earlier this season, gloriously, by Lincoln Center Theater -- established Odets as the American stage's leading progressive voice, with a keen ear for how the socially and economically downtrodden speak and dream, and the tough choices they're forced to make.

In Knife, Tinseltown and its studio system at that time are presented as particularly egregious representatives of the dark forces of commerce to which such strivers can fall prey. Now in revival (* * 1/2 out of four) at the Roundabout Theatre Company's American Airlines Theatre, where it opened Tuesday, the play explores the dilemma of Charlie Castle, a promising stage actor-turned dissatisfied movie star married to a woman, Marion, who still loves him but hates what their life has become.

But Charlie is beholden to a thuggish film mogul, Marcus Hoff, who threatens to disclose a damaging secret unless Charlie signs a new contract, one that will essentially make him studio property until he's well into middle age.

A lot of turmoil follows, and a good deal of speechifying. Where in his aforementioned earlier works, Odets channeled his moral indignation into dialogue that was at once poetic and grittily authentic, the characters in Knife tend to sound less like individuals than archetypes -- the conflicted artist, the corrupt businessman -- or vessels for the playwright's criticism.

It doesn't help that the very fine actors in this new staging, under Doug Hughes' direction, adopt different and at times conflicting approaches. Richard Kind, as Marcus, as Chip Zien, as Charlie's fundamentally decent agent, Nat Danziger, bring a stylized dynamism that feels more appropriate to the material, and the period, than Marion Ireland's curiously modern, deceptively low-key Marion.

As Charlie, the reliably charismatic Bobby Cannavale manages a vigorous naturalism that falls somewhere in the middle, but can seem stumped at times. We certainly see, in his performance, Charlie's passion for his craft, and his sense of self-reproach. What doesn't come across is the cultivated veneer of slickness; his swagger feels a little too raw, his use of the term "darling" self-conscious.

Cannavale and Ireland do make a convincing and appealing couple; as Charlie's old friend Hank Teagle, a writer played with graceful conviction by C.J. Wilson, notes to Charlie, "Marion stands in your life for your idealism, and...you've wounded her and it."

There are moments in this production -- among them the final scene, in which an anguished Marion loses her reserve -- where such lines remind you of the emotional punch Odets can pack. But all told, Knife doesn't cut as deeply as you might expect it would.